And He Blogs

Time magazine recently interviewed Morgan Spurlock, the writer and director of Super Size Me and the creator and star of 30 Days. He talks about his new season of 30 Days which starts tomorrow at 10:00pm on the FX channel, and continues every Wednesday. I recommended the show last year and it didn’t disappoint, even though there were only 6 shows (that in itself was the only disappointment).

He was also asked about a film version of the Chris Mooney book The Republican War on Science. When asked why he chose the project, his response was:

We’ve started to make science and empirical evidence not nearly as important as punditry–people using p.r.-speak to push a corporate or political agenda. I think we need to turn scientists back into the rock stars they are.

Chris Mooney of course picked up on it. He and others are part of a group of bloggers known as the “Science Bloggers“, a daily must read for me, being the technology liaison for the science building here at UMW. I appreciate Spurlock’s attempt at giving the scientists the respect that they once had, and again deserve.

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Floyd Landis, Chattanooga

Originally uploaded by Frank Steele.

No, not Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play, and maybe not exactly to the day, but 20 years ago Greg Lemond was the first American to ever win the Tour de France. He was obviously better than the rest of the field, and his only rival was his teammate, Bernard Hinault (EE-no). Greg won again in 1989 and 1990. We all know about Lance Armstrong who won seven races from 1999 to 2005.

Now, poised to possibly win his first Tour is Floyd Landis who is as I write this warming up to ride the most important ride of his life. It’s a 57Km time trial that will determine how he finishes in the 2006 Tour. Landis has had an incredible Tour. He had been the most consistent rider and had grabbed the yellow jersey of race leader a couple of times. However, the 16th stage of the 20 stage race was very cruel and Floyd wound up losing 10 minutes to the winner that day. Now even those knowledgeable to the sport would say that making up the time that he lost would not be possible, given that the only opportunity would be the next day in an equally tough stage. Well the next day, Landis defied belief when he broke away early from the pack and won the stage by 5 and a half minutes and made up all but 30 seconds on the leader.

Today, is a stage that suits Landis very well, and the only riders who can challenge him for the win are at a considerable deficit. This race has been unpredictable, and therefore anything still can happen. We’ve been spoiled by Lance Armstrong who dominated for 7 years, where the only drama was who was going to come in second. That last sentence is filled with hyperbole as anyone knows that until the race is over you don’t know who will win. Just ask Greg Lemond who on the last day of the Tour trailed the leader by 50 seconds, and only had a 24Km time trial to make it up. Impossible by most people’s standards. Lemond beat his rival by 58 seconds and wound up winning the 1989 Tour by 8 seconds, the closest margin of victory ever in the Tour de France. The 17th stage of the 2006 Tour de France will also now go down in history as one of the greatest comeback rides in Tour history. Floyd now has just a little more work to do today to etch his name into the Tour history books, and it’s funny that it’s almost exactly 20 years later, by another American. C’est Encroyable!

UPDATE: Floyd rode a very good time trial today. Not enough to win, but enough to take the overall lead by about 1 minute. That is a very safe lead going into the last day where not much can happen in the overall standings because of how flat and how controlled the racing is. Floyd Landis will be the latest American Tour de France Champion!

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This is the third post referring to Jon Udell in the last 10 days, but his influence on us is a lasting one. I found something that Jon spoke about at our 2006 Faculty Academy. In the podcast he refers to “the idea of assigning names to fragments of media” (at about the 20:28 mark in the audio file). The name that he refers to is a URL, and specifically pinpointing a time in a media file that you can reference by forming a “custom” URL.

Google, specifically Google Video, has given us a way to do this, adding to the technique that Jon showed us at Faculty Academy using Real Media. Google Video gives Jon and me the feature we’ve been looking for - Linking within a video. The basic idea is that you start with a URL to a video at Google Video’s website. If you want to pinpoint a precise spot in the video you manually add a time specification to the URL. It would look like this:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8489280619054214984#18m12s

So go ahead, click on the link above and you will be 18 minutes and 12 second into a talk about The DaVinci Code: Fact or Fiction?

Blip.tv, are you watching?

UPDATE: It’s important to note that you don’t have to wait for the video to download to the point that you’re interested in. It will immediately jump to the time you specify and then beginning its buffering from that point on.

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I couldn’t be more excited about this news about an update coming for the Sanyo VPC-HD1, a.k.a. the Xacti. The update is the HD1a, and I disagree with Matt Burns that this is just a “we forgot to put some things in the first model so here is an update” update. The new features that Matt talks about are a 16:9 still-shot mode, and a 320×240 MPEG4 video mode. What he doesn’t say is that that video mode will be Video iPod ready! The camera itself features in-camera editing, so it will be a snap to deliver a quick instructional video to an iPod user.

This device uses SD memory cards for video storage, so these files are ready to edit on a computer that has an SD card reader. A 2GB SD card (currently about $80) holds about 40 minutes of the highest quality 720p HD video. Prices for these cards have been steadily dropping. Price for the camera will be about $700 and is shipping in September.

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Thanks a lot Jon. First you posted that great lawnmower video, which reintroduced me to Blip.tv, and got the wheels in my head spinning. Then you had a fantastic “insider” podcast where you talked with Blip.tv founder Mike Hudack. As everybody knows by now, Jon was our guest speaker at the 2006 Faculty Academy in May, and he got our community really thinking about getting maximum benefit from the “meta” connections of today’s Web 2.0 world.

Well, thanks (seriously, Jon, thanks!!!) to the podcast with Mike, Blip.tv is exposed as the best of all posible worlds when it comes to a video sharing service. Check out the list of features: tag videos, ala del.icio.us; cross-post to del.icio.us and flickr (video thumbnails); cross-post to your own blog and to your Internet Archive account; export and upload your movies directly from Windows Movie Maker; Submit your video directly to iTunes; Automatic Creative Commons license; and lots more. This is obviously a well thought out service and has a less smarmy feel than YouTube and other video hosting sites.

UPDATE: Oh and they have a great blog!

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Photo by BlueAlgae

Well, I sort of got my answer from this post about the state of consumer technology 10 years ago. An article in the New York Times, in 1996, was proclaiming the DVD already dead, a non-starter, and the laserdisc was coming out with some great titles. As I’ve said before, I always love to see what the past tells us about the present.

HD-DVD and Blu-ray have already succeeded. They’ve gotten their product out the door and people are buying them. However now the success will be measured by many people and in different ways. It’s early in the format war between the two camps. HD-DVD got a head start (by a couple months), is cheaper than Blu-ray (by almost $500), and currently has more titles available (as of July 10 it’s 44 HD-DVD to 16 Blu-ray - I said it was early). So why are they so stubborn as to continue this format war? Well it’s based on this prediction which says there is a lot of money in this market.

You may not know this, but there was a format war after VHS vs. Beta and before DVDs arrived, albeit a small war. More like a police action. Laserdisc was on one side and CED was on the other (ever heard of Selectavision?). Well we all know what format won and was subsequently killed off (for the most part) by DVD.

My opinion is DVD was revolutionary, as the CD was revolutionary in the music industry. Both of these technologies are a great success. HD-DVD/Blu-ray in and of itself is evolutionary, but it’s also tied to a revolutionary technology, that of HDTV. Now are both of these formats going to succeed? My prediction is that HD-DVD will win out and here is an article that agrees with me. I will add that it seems logical to bet against Sony (who is backing Blu-ray). Three words: Beta; MiniDisc; UMD. Sony hasn’t given up on the Memory Stick though, but I digress. Sony’s Betamax was arguably the better format technically, but VHS won out. Some are saying that Blu-ray is the better technology, but having HD-DVD out of the gate sooner and being cheaper seems to bode well. Don’t forget also that Microsoft’s XBox 360 will have a HD-DVD external drive real soon.

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“And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin”

Chin Up!

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This video is interesting in a couple of ways. First, it points to a new(-ish) video service called Blip.tv which, like YouTube, serves up citizen-created video and then allows you to share it in a munber of ways. Its codde didn’t paste into my WordPress install as easily as YouTube, so there will be some tweaking to do. Second, and I will raise this from interesting to the level of fascinating, is Jon Udell’s video about why he uses a reel mower. It’s the way video instruction was meant to be. It’s available on the web in an easily digestible chunk. It appeals to the environmentalist in me. There are interesting side notes - that really is a cool T-shirt he got (watch the video already). Imagine being able to download this video to your video iPod, as you do automatically from any other source, and bring this literally out into the field and watch how to adjust your blades and see when to replace the plastic gear. The beauty of the shared expereince. Brilliant!

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I wanted to do this yesterday. Welcome Dr. Frawley. We’re excited that you’re here . . . and a fond farewell to Dr. Anderson.

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